Like the Egyptians
at the same time, the Sumerians and Iranians
around 3000-2500 BC devoted a lot of energy
to building big buildings. But unlike the Pyramids,
which are tombs for dead Pharaohs, the Sumerian and Iranian ziggurats (ZIG-oo-rats)
are temples for their gods.

Because good building stone is
hard to find in the river valley of the Euphrates
River where the Sumerians lived, the Sumerians mostly did not build
in stone. Instead, they built their ziggurats (and also their houses
and city walls) out of mud-brick, or adobe.

Ziggurats are very high buildings. You start by making a big flat platform
of mud-brick, and then you make a slightly smaller platform on top of
the first one, and another on top of that, until the platform is just
a little bigger than a temple, and then you build the temple at the
very top, like a sand-castle. Maybe Mesopotamian people thought it was better
to pray to the gods from as close as possible, and so if the gods lived
up in the sky you had to build great platforms to get near them.

Of course it isn't very hard to build a very impressive building this
way: it is solid all the way through, like a sand-castle, so it is easy to get it to stay
up.

The Jews
thought it was a very bad idea to try to reach all the way up to God
like that, and their hatred of the ziggurats is reflected in the story
of the Tower of Babel.

The Sumerians and their descendants continued to build
ziggurats well into the Middle Bronze Age (the Third
Dynasty of Ur), around 2000 BC, long
after the Egyptians had stopped building pyramids.

Bibliography and further reading about ziggurats:

The
Sumerians, by Elaine Landau (1997). Easy reading. Despite the bad Amazon
rating, this is a good solid introduction to the Sumerians, with an
explanation of prehistory at the beginning for context. Pictures of
ancient stuff, and good maps.

Karen Eva Carr, PhD.Assoc. Professor Emerita, History
Portland State University

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Professor Carr holds a B.A. with high honors from Cornell University in classics and archaeology, and her M.A. and PhD. from the University of Michigan in Classical Art and Archaeology. She has excavated in Scotland, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, and Tunisia, and she has been teaching history to university students for a very long time.

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